Notification lists are becoming an increasingly popular way for information providers on the Internet to publicize the availability of information. A notification list may be generated at a server, and the list may include items where each item may include some descriptive text such as a title and a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) link to a resource such as a document on the World Wide Web (Web).
Software agents commonly known as aggregators may be executed on client or server computer systems or other electronic devices. Aggregators may periodically poll one or more information provider servers to determine the availability of one or more notification lists and may retrieve the lists from the polled servers. Aggregators cause the items contained in the notification lists to be displayed to a user. Typically, an aggregator will display the notification lists in one or more panes. In one pane, the aggregator may display the names of the notification lists, and in another pane the aggregator may display titles of the items included in the notification lists. Some aggregators may also include another pane to display Web pages that are retrieved in response to a selection by a user of a title of an item from one of the notification lists. Other aggregators may display notification list information in other ways.
One popular example of notification lists are RSS feeds. RSS may be referred to by several names, including Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, or RDF (Resource Description Framework) Site Summary. RSS feeds may include information that is formatted in accordance with the Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard.